But let me now venture to step a little outside of my own province, my small plot—­a poor pedestrian’s unimportant impressions of places and faces; all these p’s come by accident; and this I put in parenthetically just because an editor solemnly told me a while ago that he couldn’t abide and wouldn’t have alliteration’s artful aid in his periodical.  Let us leave the subject of what Miss Mitford was to those of her day who knew her; a thousand lovely personalities pass away every year and in a little while are no more remembered than the bright-plumaged bird that falls in the tropical forest, or the vanished orchid bloom of which some one has said that the angels in heaven can look on no more beautiful thing.  Leaving all that, let us ask what remains to us of another generation of all she was and did?

She was a prolific writer, both prose and verse, and, as we know, had an extraordinary vogue in her own time.  Anything that came from her pen had an immediate success; indeed, so highly was she regarded that nothing she chose to write, however poor, could fail.  And she certainly did write a good deal of poor stuff:  it was all in a sense poor, but books and books, poor soul, she had to write.  It was in a sense poor because it was mostly ambitious stuff, and, as the proverb says, “You cannot fly like an eagle with the wings of a wren.”  She was driven to fly, and gave her little wings too much to do, and her flights were apt to be mere little weak flutterings over the surface of the ground.  A wren, and she had not a cuckoo but a devouring cormorant to sustain—­that dear, beautiful father of hers, who was more to her than any reprobate son to his devoted mother, and who day after day, year after year, gobbled up her earnings, and then would hungrily go on squawking for more until he stumbled into the grave.  Alas! he was too long in dying; she was worn out by then, the little heart beating not so fast, and the bright little brain growing dim and very tired.

Now all the ambitious stuff she wrote to keep the cormorant and, incidentally, to immortalize herself, has fallen deservedly into oblivion.  But we—­some of us—­do not forget and never want to forget Mary Russell Mitford.  Her letters remain—­the little friendly letters which came from her pen like balls of silvery down from a sun-ripened plant, and were wafted far and wide over the land to those she loved.  There is a wonderful charm in them; they are so spontaneous, so natural, so perfectly reflect her humour and vivacity, her overflowing sweetness, her beautiful spirit.  And one book too remains—­the series of sketches about the poor little hamlet, in which she lived so long and laboured so hard to support herself and her parents, the turtledove mated with a cormorant.  Driven to produce work and hard up for a subject, in a happy moment she took up this humble one lying at her own door and allowed her self to write naturally even as in her most intimate letters.